Rachmaninoff: Symphony 1 + Symphonic Dances

Album review

The crushing failure of Rachmaninov's Symphony No. 1 at its premiere on 15 March 1897 plunged its young author into a deep depression from which he would later issue Concerto No. 2, composed in compensation for this disaster and under the influence of a medical treatment based on hypnosis. This first Symphony was ambitious. The young artist wanted to express so many feelings that the score bulged, opaque in terms of its form and profuse by the admission of the writer, who would go on to denigrate it later. This cursed score would never be played again during the composer's lifetime and the manuscript remains lost. It was reconstructed, probably with the help of orchestral parts, and recreated in Moscow in 1945.

Captured in concert in 2018, here it is adorned with a thousand and one colours from the Philadelphia Orchestra under the charged, powerful and imaginative direction of Yannick Nézet-Seguin who believes in this work and conducts it as a masterpiece and not in any sense for the purpose of rehabilitation. Under such an inspired baton, this youthful opus 13 can happily be presented next to Rachmaninov's final score for orchestra, one of the most successful: the famous Symphonic Dances that are a metaphor for the three ages of man. Rachmaninov's obsession with bells and the Catholic theme of the Dies Irae is well known, both of which he sets to music in virtually all of his works; it is already the case in Symphony No. 1 and it will be the case again in the masterful Symphonic Dances performed here by the orchestra for which they were written in 1940, three years before the composer's death in California, where he had gone into exile. © François Hudry/Qobuz